While
I've been a T-Mobile customer for almost 15 years, I recently moved my
wife to Cricket Wireless because she was experiencing several dropped
calls a day in the areas that she works. Cricket Wireless offers a
reasonably priced prepaid service option and is powered by AT&T's
network. Today though, it failed miserably and customers are irate.
Friday nights are busy
for many folks as the work week ends and weekend plans are put into
motion. I tried calling and texting my wife on my way home to coordinate
dinner plans and ask if she needed me to do anything to help her get
out the door for her monthly bunco night. She also attempted to text and
receive calls from some participants that couldn't make it.
None
of these communications took place since Cricket Wireless service went
down for her at about 1 pm Pacific. Almost ten hours later, she still
has no service.
I understand that there could be local outages due
to emergency situations or some technical issue, however this current
Cricket Wireless outage is reportedly affecting customers across the US.
Even more frustrating though is that there was a single Tweet six hours
ago from Cricket Nation on Twitter
that read, "We are aware of a service issue affecting some customers
& are working quickly to resolve it. We apologize for this
inconvenience."
Visiting the Downdetector.com website
showed that others across the country were experiencinc the outage with
nearly 21,000 comments left on this site alone. I Tweeted a couple of
things and Cricket replied that "some customers" were experiencing
issues. There were more than some. A couple of people informed me on
Twitter that visiting a Cricket store revealed some kind of planned
outage for an update. If that was indeed the case, then Cricket should
have forewarned all its customers so plans could have been made in
advance.
One thing that this outage has shown my wife is that text
messaging is not the best messaging solution to rely upon. She
communicated with her friends via Facebook Messenger and a WiFi
connection. It's a good idea to have an alternate messaging solution
that doesn't rely on the cellular network, especially if you have some
critical communications need.
My wife loves the coverage she gets
from Cricket Wireless and is unlikely to move to another network, unless
of course her service never returns when she will be forced to find
another solution. Outages, and even more so the lack of communication
from the provider, will definitely cause people to reevaluate their
choice of carrier.
Cricket Wireless needs to get out there and
explain the issue, let customers know when to expect service back, and
then offer up some kind of credit for the outage. We reached out to
Cricket Wireless to request some answers to these questions.
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